China's Taxi Strikes: A Test for the Government

Local residents and police surround taxies parked along a street in Chongqing, China, on Nov. 4, 2008, a day after taxi drivers staged a large protest over increased operating costs, gas shortages, and high traffic fines

Another day, another strike. But this isn't France or India. It's China. On Nov. 27, yet another Chinese city was hit by a work stoppage by its taxi drivers, this time in Chaozhou, a city of some 2.5 million residents in the southern province of
Guangdong. Repeating the pattern started when cabbies went on strike in the huge metropolis of Chongqing in central China on
November 6, the mayor of Chaozhou sat down for talks with representatives of the
drivers, who complained of competition from illegal cabs, gouging by the
taxi companies from whom they rented their cars and collusion between
the companies and corrupt local officials.

By a rough estimate, this was the eighth time in four weeks that taxi
drivers
around the nation had slammed on their brakes, making the rolling strikes
the longest sustained chain reaction of labor unrest in the history of
the People's Republic. The strikes are emerging as a test case of a new
policy of information control and management instituted by President Hu
Jintao that shuns the authorities' traditional emphasis on suppressing
bad news altogether and stresses instead using official media to attempt
to control how events like strikes, protests and even natural disasters
are reported in China. The complex methods Beijing uses to try and dictate what its populace reads, watches and hears about events in their
own country are a key element of how the Communist Party maintains power.
But as the world economic crisis deepens and unrest
becomes more widespread, the central government has had to tweak how it wages its propaganda war. Just how successfully it manages to
control the way events unfold will become increasingly critical in
preventing isolated cases from turning into the kind of large-scale civil unrest that threatens the party.

On the whole, the rolling taxi strikes have been remarkable for the
restraint shown by the authorities, whose response to challenges from
below can often be ham-fisted  and brutal. They have also drawn
attention for the relatively unfettered coverage given to them in the state
media  particularly the first strike in Chongqing when state media, such
as the Xinhua News Agency, featured lengthy stories detailing
how the local governor and central politburo member Bo Xilai led
negotiations to resolve the dispute.

The idea of such guided coverage in the official media was first raised by
President
Hu in 2007 and given a fresh boost in June when he gave a
speech pressing for the party to strengthen
guidance of public opinion in both new and old media. "This new policy
is happening because these incidents are happening more and more often
and they realize they can't control the spread of the news," says David
Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong's China Media
Project. Bandurski says the Chongqing case was a textbook example of the new
policy, which he calls "Control 2.0." The government attempts to set the
agenda on controversial issues by allowing initial reporting
by the likes of Xinhua. At the same time, Beijing bars reporters from the
increasingly popular so-called "city papers," which are commercially
oriented,
tabloid offshoots of hard-line Party papers, such as the People's Daily. These newer papers have to attract readers to survive financially, so they are often in the market for audience-grabbing stories about graft or official malfeasance.

"It's ingenious. The government gets in first with its version of the
news," says Bandurski, "and we can surmise that it's accompanied by a
propaganda department
directive barring the city papers from covering the event so they have
to use the official version." Bandurski believes that the credibility of
market-oriented papers, like the Southern Metropolis Daily, is significantly higher than that of the older papers, whose
readership has been steadily declining for years.

But the continuing wave of taxi strikes underlines a danger that
the more upfront coverage of controversial issues carries with it: the
danger of copycat incidents in other parts of the country. With the
police detaining or jailing leaders of some of the strikes, those
involved are understandably reluctant to discuss their motivations. But
many observers believe that there is little doubt the lengthy coverage
of the strikes in the official media was seen as a form of
legitimization by later strikers. "There have been taxi-driver strikes
occasionally in the past a few years, but never so many in such a short
period of time," says Liu Feiyue of Civil Rights & Livelihood Watch, a
Hubei province-based rights group. "There is a domino effect, even
though the drivers might deny it. The initial strikes are an inspiration
to the later ones."

With other events, the government's tactics have been to dominate the
initial coverage and then let the story die a natural death. Normally,
"within days the story starts to blow over and there's reader fatigue
with it so they move onto to the next story in the news cycle," Bandurski
says. "It's very effective." But that method is trickier with an issue like
the
taxi strikes, which are the result of long-standing grievances  sometimes going back a decade  that have been left largely unaddressed. Unlike other protests, these strikes are not directed specifically against the communist party, which may also explain why the official media has been given freer reins. Still, now that the taxi unrest is a nationwide occurrence, there's no longer much coverage of them in the state press. Indeed, the noticeable drop-off in coverage of is a strong indicator that the cadres who monitor the
media have decided the time has come to move on.

But will Chinese be so easily diverted? Some analysts of the Chinese media
scene, including the respected former editor Li Datong, have expressed
optimism that the new policy could be a
sign the government is willing to be more open about allowing wider
coverage of sensitive incidents like strikes and environmental disasters.
But
Bandurski says that, if anything, the opposite is true. In the case of
the taxi strikes, there have been no follow-up
investigations of the corruption that lies at the root of the issue. "You
speak to any working reporter and they'll tell you that control is
getting tighter," says Bandurski. "Even on the editorial pages, which
traditionally used to
be a place some of these issues could be teased out. There's nothing.
It's worrying. Even chilling."